This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of in- come and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

We estimate and analyze the global income distribution from national log-normal income distributions for the years 1970 to 2003, as well as the income distribution of seven regional subsamples. From these distributions we obtain measures for global and regional inequality and poverty, and find...

In this paper we analyze the world´s cross-national distribution of income and its evolution from 1970 to 2003. We argue that modeling this distribution by a finite mixture and investigating its number of components has advantages over nonparametric inference concerning the number of modes. In...